By Matt Zoller Seitz
Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia earned raves from a few reviewers and disses and dismissals from the rest. (As of this writing, its Metacritic score is a fulcrum-centered 49 – a surefire indicator of a love-it-or-hate-it experience.) But whatever Dahlia's long-term prospects, it at least prompted widespread interest in De Palma, whose 40-year career has inspired wildly mixed reactions (with the conspicuous exception of The Untouchables, which was kinetic but shallow, and never sexy). Granted, he's not easy to defend; he wraps enlightenment inside neuroses, and his work can be elegant and obvious, sophisticated and silly, all at once. But even if you accept this caveat, Dahlia is still vexing. Even boosters are having trouble warming to it -- a problem explored in detail by De Palma obsessive Dennis Cozzalio over at Sergio Leone and The Infield Fly Rule, in a lengthy essay that describes this writer’s review as persuasive, but only to a point.
The Black Dahlia seems to me an intelligently mounted misfire, one that fails to make its central metaphor, the bisected body of an already degraded and humiliated starlet, who might just as easily have been ground up and spat in two halves from the gaping maw of the Hollywood machine, resonate with the kind of force that might have carried the movie to lofty, expressive heights....[D]espite its considerable craft and obvious serious of intent, [it] feels listless, indifferent, and disconnected from the film noir tropes, character conflicts, and even the meticulously reconstructed 1940s-era Los Angeles (shot entirely on sets in Bulgaria) it so tantalizingly recreates. And I think it is possible to recognize that in The Black Dahlia De Palma could very well be trying, at age 66, to reframe the strategies and conclusions of his entire career. He made a similar summation when he employed the technique he honed so brilliantly in Sisters, Carrie and Dressed to Kill to inform the personal paranoia and political outrage at the heart of Blow Out. The difference is that in Blow Out the result was an appreciable heightening of De Palma’s abilities to express his personal concerns in filmmaking about and within the thriller form. The Black Dahlia may involve a process of discovery for De Palma, one which may yet result in another major work that couldn’t have existed without the conscious reevaluation that Matt claims the director is engaging in here. But the film itself has the meandering feel of an artist in search of meaning, rather than one who has discovered it and is putting it to new and exciting use.
Christian Science Monitor movie critic Peter Rainer penned a similarly conflicted piece for last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Curiously, though, Rainer’s essay – which I’ve been carrying around in my bookbag and re-reading since my SoCal trip last weekend – seems afflicted by the same muddled POV it ascribes to Dahlia; the piece veers between defending De Palma as a misunderstood visionary and conceding that his detractors might have a point when they suggest that he's not really ambivalent about savagery, but flat-out digs it (particularly when it's directed against women) and that his sinuously expressive filmmaking may disguise an absence of depth. “The dread he parlays has never quite devolved into shtick because, even in a film as roundly slammed and wildly unsatisfactory as The Black Dahlia, there are moments when his ecstatic love of filmmaking comes through,” Rainer writes. “But his ardor can be a mixed blessing. De Palma's technique alone can hold you, but sometimes we must ask: Technique in the service of what?” He goes on to write:In the mid-'80s [De Palma] said in an interview, "I don't start with an idea about content. I start with a visual image." In the same interview he said, "I'm interested in motion, sometimes violent motions, because they work aesthetically in film."Say what? Having seen Carrie on a big screen just last weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – my first time seeing it with an audience in about 15 years -- that final description rings false for a number of reasons, particularly its employment of the all-encompassing phrase “every boy’s,” which not only denies the possibility of male empathy for Carrie at her moment of humiliation, but also implies (perhaps inadvertently) that the opening sequence is mainly interested in embodying teenage male anxiety, and that there's nothing in it that might resonate with women.
But surely this patter about pure cinema is a decoy. A sports film, for example, offers abundant opportunities for dynamic movement, and yet De Palma has never attempted one of those. As a rule, things really get rolling for him when his camera tracks are slicked with fresh blood. The fact that the blood most often belongs to women, who are perceived as prey, or that sex is often the lure for violence in his films, fouls the air.
In Dressed to Kill, probably his most controversial movie, an unhappily married woman played by Angie Dickinson has a hot tryst with a dark stranger and gets sliced to death in an elevator for her troubles. The camerawork throughout all this is — no other word for it — gorgeous. It's an emblematic sequence for De Palma and the sickest of jokes: Sex, even good sex, can only end badly.
Despite the super-sophistication of his technique, in essence De Palma's movies express, at least for men in the audience, how sex was experienced as an adolescent. An early adolescent. They capture the rage and mortification, the guilt, the tingle of voyeurism. In Carrie, the slo-mo glide through the girls' locker room that opens the movie is every boy's porno fantasia.
What floors me about the opening sequence – beyond its nightmarish control of composition, movement, editing, color and sound – is its empathy for its heroine as she experiences her long-delayed first menstruation in public, mere moments after enjoying a rare moment of guilt-free sexual bliss. Until this moment, Carrie’s maturation has been stunted by her fundamentalist mom, who wants her to remain desexualized -- emotionally and physically fixed, therefore docile and dependent, a receptive vessel in every sense. Suddenly and horribly, Carrie is confronted with direct physical refutation of her mother’s values (which are not innately feminine values, but regurgitated patriarchal scare tactics handed down through two millenia). That blood represents her essence as a woman and a human being, the true self she been forced to deny. Then, at what’s surely one of the most humilating moments of her life,
representatives of the gender that logically should sympathize with her dehumanize and persecute her, pelting her with tampons and sanitary napkins while crowing, “Plug it up!” (Teachers who want to illustrate what it means to internalize an oppressor’s values should screen Carrie in class.) The crimson spilling from Carrie’s body prefigures her killer Christ explosion at the prom -- drenched in pig’s blood, she kills the pigs. Rainer describes the ending as "ghastly comic justice," but it's no joke. The film's nightmarishly hopeless opening and demonically empowered climax mirror -- in some ways answer -- each other, superimposing multiple cultural and religious associations (Old Testament admonitions, Puritan witch-hunting, Catholic iconography, Freud's greatest hits) upon the tragedy of Carrie's life, making the archetypal personal. Most impressively, the two sequences accomplish all this via picture and sound, mostly avoiding explanatory dialogue. Psychological, religious and political complexity conveyed without words: that's commercial narrative filmmaking at its zenith. _______________________________________________
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe where there’s nothing on TV but The Wire, Bethlehem Shoals of the excellent blog Heaven and Here observes that Honey Nut Cheerio-craving rip-and-run artist Omar Little and rising drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield are the show’s two most nearly-mythic characters -- and wonders if they can both survive the season.
“Put simply, The Wire is not big enough for both Marlo and Omar," Shoals writes. "Omar more or less stalks a make-believe world, in which homosexuality hinders not his fearsome rep, his tight-knit crew is invincible, and his whim dictates city-wide drug trade policy. Of course, all of this is unabashedly true, making Omar one of the few characters on The Wire who defies the show’s insistence on stark realism. It’s been said that Omar is more myth than man, more urban legend than rendered individual; while I agree with this reading, you have to wonder how we’re then to understand his intersections with the less ethereal beings in the narrative....The equally unstoppable Marlo seems to now verge on this hallowed terrain. Impossibly cocky, shrewd and determined, he’s the closest we’ve seen to the perfect criminal. So far this season, there have been hints that he might be overreaching, or that this unprecedented badness might be one long delusion on his part. As of #41, though, we viewers have no reason to believe that Marlo’s not at least a decent fraction of the model kingpin he’s seemingly styled himself as. 
And even if his form of perfection seems more deliberate than Omar’s felicitous stash house tour, Young Stanfield is still set up as someone close to achieving his ideal....Of course, this in some ways seems at odds with the rest of The Wire in which the very notion of “perfection” is a ruse designed to replace complexity with invidious “imperfection.” Few characters on the show could, in their functional capacity as police, administrators, criminals, or politicans, be described as effortlessly, seamlessly fulfilling their role’s basic duties. In fact, if one compares almost anyone else to the sheer mastery that is Omar or Marlo, only Lester and Prop Joe come off as anything less than distracted, even bumbling…The imminent Omar/Marlo showdown, then, confuses me for a number of reasons. On one level, it’s fucking awesome; on another, it seems to foreground the two characters least representative of the show’s way with fiction…[D]oes this battle between two creatures from beyond the pale of realism confound The Wire’s atmosphere, turning it into a playground for figments of the urban fantastic?"Discuss, preferably while eating Honey Nut Cheerios.
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Talking shop: At the screenwriter-centric blog Mystery Man on Film, the pseudonymous author, a screenwriter, grooves on the recent explosion in film and TV blogging, then poses a series of rhetorical questions to fellow screenwriters:
The film bloggers expound upon every little obsession they have about movies - the people they love, the faces they love, the filmmakers they love, the techniques they love, the great compositions of shots, the art of visual storytelling, and on and on. They continually feed each other and they are revolutionizing the way people talk about film. They reveal everything because they have nothing to lose...We screenwriters, on the other hand, reveal nothing, because we think we have everything to gain by keeping it all to ourselves.Frankly, I've never understood the cult of secrecy enfolding Mystery Man's profession. Seems to me that in screenwriting, as in any creative pursuit, how you say something matters as much as -- usually more than -- how you say it. It's an art form, and art can only deepen if artists talk shop.
Who gives a flying flip if you – OH MY GOD - reveal the things you’ve learned about the craft? Or what you love about movies? Or the script-to-screen studies you did six years ago? Or the insights you have about film technique, formatting, characters, dialogue, style, structure, or anything else you love about screenwriting? How else are you going to grow if you don’t talk to others about the craft and ask questions and get the kind of feedback that takes you to a new level?
Tangentially, I've also found that writers who habitually decline to discuss what they're working on out of fear that somebody might steal their ideas have few ideas worth stealing -- and if they do, they'll soon learn that secrecy is no defense against the mathematical probabilities of the zeitgeist. Chances are, if a strong, easily graspable idea for a story just suddenly came to you out of the blue, that means it was floating around in the pop culture unconscious, which in turn means that at this very instant, dozens of screenwriters all over the world are working on vaguely similar concepts, one of which will probably get produced first, not necessarily because it's the deepest or most exciting take on the subject, but because the screenwriter knows somebody who knows somebody who works for ICM. Seems to me the only sane response to fear of idea theft is to reject it as a waste of precious mental energy -- though I'm sure the 438 still-unknown screenwriters who penned scripts about snakes on a plane may beg to differ. _______________________________________________
Who's your Dada? Should Jackass Number Two be in contention for a Best Documentary Oscar? The question isn’t that radical; in fact, it came up back in December of 2002, when factions within the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Circles argued that Jackass: The Movie was the best nonfiction feature in a year that also saw the release of Frederick Wiseman's monumental Domestic Violence. Although I haven’t yet seen the sequel, I get the first movie's popularity (it’s old-fashioned circus geekery with an X-treme comedy makeover). And the contrarian in me respects anyone with stones enough to claim, among other things, that (1) Johnny Knoxville and company are Dadaists, (2) that boisterously crazy straight dudes obsessed with inflicting pain on their nether regions are actually closet cases, and (3) that the Jackass phenomenon reveals that the essence of male bonding is sadomasochism. (For a provocative if brief case for point #1, see Nathan Lee's New York Times review.) Granted, far less original talents have been nominated for Oscars and won, and the idea of Academy having standards to defend is Dadaist humor of a different sort. Still, Jackass-as-great-surrealist-subversive-populist-etc. sounds, at worst, like an attempt to intellectualize a visceral response, and it makes one envision practitioners of the old, square version of nonfiction filmmaking (choosing a subject, doing interviews and research, editing to bring out motifs and themes, etc) reading such arguments and thinking, bitterly, "I get it -- if I want critics to get really excited about nonfiction cinema, I need to videotape myself sticking thumbtacks in my forehead." (Having said that, I'll see the Jackass sequel soon and eat crow if required. Not literally.)
Along these lines, A.J. Schnack poses good questions: “Now, it's unlikely that Johnny Knoxville and company are looking for an Oscar nod. And even if they qualified, it seems unlikely that they'd make it through the screening procedures and short-listing. But does the film deserve to be considered? Is it even a documentary? And if it isn't, what disqualifies it? The ‘scripted’ stunts? Is setting up a specific stunt any different than setting up an interview?” Then the writer concludes, “There's no question that Jackass [Number Two] will be the biggest nonfiction film this year; the question is whether anyone, in the doc world or out, will acknowledge it.”
Discuss – preferably while dropping baby scorpions on your t'aint.
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14 comments:
Thanks for the article on Omar and Marlo. It touches on some of my concerns for the show, particularly regarding its otherwise near-stellar record for realism. I have no doubt that Marlo will eventually receive his comeuppance; he suffers from a touch too much hubris to avoid a great fall. Omar, though, is a different kinda cat. He's so elusive and chameleon-like that he's able to keep beneath his opponent's radar, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphors. That said, and while I love watching Omar go through his paces, it would probably be to the show's credit veracity and realism-wise to have Omar endure the kinda fate that his real-life counterpart would suffer, if such a cat actually existed.
Dan: The town ain't big enough for the both of them. Having had access to the whole season, I better stop there. I agree, though, that both Marlo and Omar (practically anagrams!) represent a departure from the show's preference for near-journalistic realism. As David Simon has said elsewhere, Omar is practically a spaghetti western character, and Marlo often comes off as an icy-cold cousin of Wesley Snipes' bad guy in New Jack City (who, let's not forget, worshipped Pacino's Scarface). But even neorealist crime fiction plays to the balconies once in awhile; it's human nature to wish to give the audience what it wants, and there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't give it to them in exactly the way they expected; best of all is when the storyteller springs a surprise based on what he'd trained you to expect.
Re: Talking Shop
I think part of the problem is that the divide between professional and amateur screenwriters is so large (or more accurately, divided by such a huge wall) that there's very little communication between the two. The amateurs talk and argue amongst themselves, and I'm sure the professionals have their own places to talk shop -- and what's the incentive for them to bring that kind of discussion into the public sphere?
However, while I do think screenwriters of all skill levels should engage in more open dialogue, there's a feeling I get -- that I don't get from reading straight film crit sites -- that there's something myopic about focusing so much on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting. It can be very suffocating. I, for one, get just as much out of reading film criticism as I do reading about screenwriters talking about structure, character, etc.
Regardless, there are two sites that come to mind: John August's blog (http://johnaugust.com/) and the Artful Writer blog (http://artfulwriter.com/) And, uh, if I may be so bold, Spitball! (http://hellbox.org/sb/), the blog I maintain with my writing partner, Martin McClellan. We're writing a screenplay publicly, through the blog, from conception through final draft, and I invite anyone reading to come see what we're doing and comment.
kza: Thanks for the links.
You raise some good points, particularly about the emphasis on nuts and bolts. That sort of thing is certainly useful, but when I visit bookstores and browse the film section, I am often bewildered and depressed by all the screenwriting books that have more or less the same things to say about structure, character motivation, closure, etc. I feel like they're unintentionally conditioning new screenwriters to conform to factory specifications, and become part of the problem (predictable Hollywood product) rather than the solution (surprising, original work that seems blissfully unaware of the "rules" -- Charlie Kaufman being exhibit A).
RE: Jackass: Number Two
I just saw it this afternoon and walking out I was thinking to myself, will this wind up on somebody's top ten list? I didn't see the first one but I hear people say it was better. It's shorter so it has that as a positive but I had a really fun, albeit tense and nervous, time laughing at all the ludicrous idiocy onscreen. And it just doesn't quit, one thing after another, until about halfway when it gets a little tiresome for a few "skits" and then gets pretty great before a mediocre ending. As for that whole Dada argument, I don't know. Point 2 is a little more arguable, I think, what with the first skit involving Pontius feeding his dick to a serpent and the later, even more amazing Butt Chug by Steve-O. Point 3 should be obvious enough for most people to champion, but my bonding has never taken that bent being the wuss that I am.
Matt, lemme make this perfectly clear (heh): Like you I'm trying to forget that I've got the fourth season under my belt, and so the above comments are restricted to the hypothetical. My reactions to these characters and anticipation of their collective fate is based solely upon how I felt about each character after the first few episodes of this season. Just so's nobody thinks I'm being a stinker or something.
As The Wire gets tons and tons of print (and web text) this year, a meme that keeps coming up is that regarding the mythic status of Omar. And I always wonder, have these people (i'm not referring to the crew here, btw, but I see this elsewhere) watched the previous seasons of the show or just heard about how cool Omar is and now see him in his PJs and write about it?
Omar more or less stalks a make-believe world, in which homosexuality hinders not his fearsome rep...
His homosexuality doesn't come up as much now, but in the first two seasons there's constant deregatory reference to this by the Barksdale's and others, calling for the head of that cocksucker and other such statements. Does it hinder not his fearsome rep? Perhaps, but I think the fear of his shotgun taking precedence over his homosexuality when he's inside a stache house doesn't exactly violate any records for realism.
...his tight-knit crew is invincible...
Lesse... the three man crew in season 1... one man killed early on, and Omar's lover tortured and killed... season 3, half of the female half (one quarter) of the crew gets killed in a wild street shootout.. and his new lover gets kidnapped and tortured (and unlike Brandon, flips on Omar). I'm not a critic, so I'm only four episodes into Season 4, so I don't know about what this season holds. But for the first three... yeah, invincible...
...and his whim dictates city-wide drug trade policy.
Smart, head to the ground dealers like Joe try to avoid him or work with him, others but heads with him. Sometimes staches get moved. I'm not sure how this is considered his whim dictating policy, unless I'm forgetting some details.
None of this is to say that Omar couldn't be a Leone character, he could. But it seems to be almost too much emphasis on that aspect of the character.
In order, then:
Cozzalio and Little Round-Headed Boy's takes on DAHLIA are among the best I've read, despite my disagreement with their conclusions. They came to their disappointment by engaging the film with respect and attention, not dismissing it, and that's more important in a critic than that my opinions get reinforced. I do agree with Cozzalio that the arrogance of some De Palma defenders can be a problem.
As one of those who catches THE WIRE on its DVD release (and thus hasn't been reading the reviews and comments on this site, regrettably), I thought season 3 Marlo was a believable enough character, his too-cool badassness stemming more from youthful arrogance and bluster than Omar's mythic zen-gunfighter calm. If he's gone the route the article indicates, does it at least seem organic from last season?
I actually thought screenwriters blogs had exploded over the last few years. I've read a couple here and there, and they seem pretty forthcoming about the actual mechanics of getting the job done. And whatever one thinks of his DAHLIA screenplay, Josh Friedman's regrettably rare postings on his blog are always worth a read.
I enjoyed JACKASS NUMBER TWO as much as its predecessor--they are among the funniest films I've ever seen. Casting the boys as punk dadaists (or situationists, more accurately)? Maybe, but I'm a little wary of how academic readings om pop culture so often seem designed to grant a ligitimacy that was never requested. How many artists--from Cervantes to Chuck Jones--made tongue-in-cheek reference to their works of fiction being precisely that? Did the gags suddenly become funnier or more inspired because postmodernists appropriated them later on? The last thing the JACKASS troupe needs is respectability. Besides, the real attraction of the film for me as a social document was seeing how, now older and weary of so many bruises and fractures, they've all (with the inspiringly masochistic exception of Knoxville) grown a bit tired of the stunts, and frequently express how little they look forward to whatever fresh hell is upcoming. If they do some more over the years this could be the 7 UP series of the American skater subset. Though needless to say Tremaine is a much greater director than Apted has ever been.
Tremaine is a much greater director than Apted has ever been.
Really? I honestly have never seen any of the 7UP series but find this hard to believe.
Ryland: "Really? I honestly have never seen any of the 7UP series but find this hard to believe."
Well, I might be giving Tremaine too much credit for merely faithfully recording an atmosphere rather than creating one, but the films perfectly convey the boisterous, competitive comraderie that makes these goofball pranksters fun to hang around. They're also remarkably well-paced for compilation films, knowing when to throw in brief, wordless one-offs to balance the dragged out, anxiety-inducing preparations for more elaborate stunts. Remember also that one of Apted's participants (the schoolteacher, if I remember correctly) has opted out of the series for what he considers Apted's over reliance on cliche and conventional wisdom, while Tremaine has no compunction about surprising even his target audience; thus the big musical close (which I enjoyed more than you) that's not only about the last thing you'd expect but is a sly tweak at the "are-they-gay" commentaries.
So I actually mean it sincerely, though I should admit it was a flippant comment. 49 UP is one of the upcoming films I'm most looking forward to. I'm no great fan of Apted (COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER excepted), but he deserves all the credit in the world for seeing the 7 UP films through for over 4 decades. The series's flaws wither away compared to the rather marvelous fact that the document exists at all.
Re: Carrie
Oy---that opening locker-room shot is pretty much when I got sick of DePalma and never came back. The slow track through hot-hot-hot! girls, steam rising around them---it was clever, and witty, and sexy, and had nothing at all to do with actual high-school girls, not least because of the striking lack of girl who weren't slim and busty. And the "plug it up" bit is even more ludicrous on film that it was in the book---that is, quite simply, not how a group of girls acts (would they torment Carrie? Sure. Just not like a bunch of howling football players).
So yeah, between the universal hotness of the girls (and their artful poses), and their pre-pubescent behavior, I'm definitely down with calling the opening a porno fantasy for 13-year-old boys. Seemingly made by one.
Matt: In this one post you've given us enough stuff to chew on for a few months! (I'm still catching up with Season One of "The Wire" on DVD, so I'm saving those posts for later.)
A couple things about the opening of "Carrie": That locker sequence is not, in fact, the opening of the movie. The opening shot cranes down from above a volleyball court as Carrie flubs a play and is cursed out by the other girls. So, we already know she's the school scapegoat before the girls head for the showers. It's important to remember that in 1976 "Carrie" was marketed as a teen sexploitation/horror movie -- a drive-in movie with (as it turns out) artistic cred. (I'll never forget my freshman Cinema Studies professor recommending it when it was playing first-run -- I couldn't believe it! I saw it in a downtown Seattle theater with a mostly black crowd -- and, wow, did it play! People were screaming and laughing and shouting like crazy.)
Anyway, I think you are indeed supposed to think -- in the movement of that second shot through the locker room, and the sexy shower-nozzle and body shots of Carrie -- of an adolescent boy's fantasy. Then she begins to bleed -- for a moment you don't know what's going on any more than she does -- and the "fantasy" is undermined by biological and psychological reality. Our sympathies are always overwhelmingly with Carrie, but we have to admit (as I think Betty Buckley says) that she can be infuriatingly self-destructive at times. The fact that she always behaves as if you're about to hit her makes you feel like slapping her at times, if only to snap her out of it and get her to stand up for herself. (Of course, we haven't met her mom yet, to see where so much of Carrie's "kick-me" attitude has been formed.)
Also, I think Peter misreads "Dressed to Kill." What makes the museum sequence so delirious is that the camerawork and music express Angie Dickinson's erotic intoxication; she's finally letting herself go and getting the sexual satisfaction she deserves, and has obviously been denied. The fact that she then discovers the dire consequences of her brief afternoon fling is -- in classic film noir tradition -- a terrible irony. Just one little slip opens up a whole world of unforseen ramifications, all out of proportion to her mild transgression. And just when she's nearly keeling over, contemplating the repercussions of what she's done, she gets into the elevator and things suddenly get far, far worse than she -- or we -- could have expected.
What's remarkable -- and exemplary -- about these sequences is that they are not simply one thing (boy fantasies) or another (sympathetic portrayals of women), but that they overturn expectations by skillfully manipulating both of these things (and more) at the same time. They are complex emotional scenes -- not just cynical exploitations of fantasy OR sympathy.
Somewhat offtopic but I just wanted to say that its no longer true that there's nothing on TV but The Wire. Dexter just started on Showtime and it's toe-curlingly delightful.
Jim writes: "What's remarkable -- and exemplary -- about these sequences is that they are not simply one thing (boy fantasies) or another (sympathetic portrayals of women), but that they overturn expectations by skillfully manipulating both of these things (and more) at the same time. They are complex emotional scenes -- not just cynical exploitations of fantasy OR sympathy."
That's true, but I don't think it goes far enough. The sequence starts out promising the voyeuristic usual, only done more artfully. Then when the scene reveals Carrie alone in the shower, suddenly it's no longer clear that the film's POV is typically male and omniscient; there's a suggestion that the dreamy tone is partly dictated by Carrie's own emotional state (the steamy dissolves, especially). Then the blood shatters the reverie; the fantasy ends and the nightmare begins. The shift in tone is directly tied to Carrie's shifting emotions; that's why it segues from cheesy drive-in softcore to Biblically-inflected horror film. It's also in some ways a repudiation of the power of the male gaze. Almost a retaliation, really. The blood is Carrie's punishment for dreaming.
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